I often see members of public high intensity training forums posting videos of themselves performing exercises and sometimes asking for feedback on their form, which is almost always terrible. Although there are sometimes one or two others who provide good advice on how to correct it, most others compliment them on their “great” form because they don’t know any better, either. In fact, most of them have never seen an exercise performed with anything remotely close to proper form.
I sometimes give a few suggestions for fixing the most obvious form problems, but, I can’t afford to spend time providing feedback on every bad form video I see, so I decided to record a short video I can share with them instead, which I streamed on YouTube a few days ago.
Before some of you get upset, I realize not everyone’s form sucks—I know and have even trained a few of you and know for a fact many long-time readers of this blog do have good form—however, although almost everyone believes their form is good, almost everyone’s form sucks. If you’re one of them, the tips in this video will help you if you apply them.
If you have questions about anything in this video, want to learn more about proper exercise performance in general and the proper way to perform specific exercises, want to see videos of proper exercise form, or want detailed feedback on your exercise form or workouts, join the HIT List forum.
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Please insert Captions in YouTube videos
Thank you
YouTube should be automatically generating captions for most of these. If you aren’t seeing captions I may have forgotten to specify the language.
Hi Drew,
I am not sure how related this is to your topic on poor form.
Hope all is well I have not posted for some time but still follow your excellent advice on exercise. What I have noticed in relation to good form or poor form is that if I don’t fully recover say train more than once every seven days. If I try to train more often then once every seven days after a while I find myself starting to cheat the repetitions and my form starts to slowly breakdown for each repetitions and each set I do. I think that to some extent that this is what happens when people try to train too often – for example training every day. They start to cheat on each and every repetition and each and every set because they are not fully recovered. I noticed that when my body is not fully recovered this is what I automatically start to do. But when I train once every seven days and fully recovered my exercise form seems a lot better. Just a bit of thought.
This may be a factor, especially if someone is more focused on how many repetitions they perform rather than how well they perform them, and are more concerned with matching or exceeding their previous performance than efficiently inroading the target muscle groups.